Basically everyone in the community agrees that Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora are the best choices for new users. Mint and Ubuntu are pretty similar, so they don’t require separate maintenance effort, and supporting Fedora is not that hard, if you already support RHEL, CentOS or another rpm-based distro (which are pretty common in the enterprise space). For all the desktop applications, Flatpak exists and is agreed on as the standard format by most of the desktop Linux community.

Of course not. They wouldn’t have had any reason to switch.

Of course they would? Millions of euros of tax revenue sounds like a pretty compelling reason to me. This is why Micro$oft’s “lobby efforts” should be labeled as what they are: Nothing more and nothing less than corruption.

It takes more maintenance than Windows.

If you create your own distro, yes. But there are countless noob-friendly distros like Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora that they could use with practically 0 maintenance required. Also, compare the 2004 desktop Linux experience to now. Having used Gentoo Linux compiled from a stage 1 tarball back in 2002, I can tell you: the differences are tremendous. Many of the issues they had can be directly attributed to OpenOffice and it’s bad compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, which has long been replaced by LibreOffice. It still worked out pretty well for them, over a period of 13 years. And it saved the tax payer millions of euros of Microsoft’s stupid licensing fee for their crappy proprietary garbage.

From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?

The city of Munich deployed their own custom Linux systems many years ago. But since it wasn’t really maintained and updated, the user experience was pretty bad and the city’s employees were unhappy. Then Micro$oft lobbyists also came in and made them switch - by threatening to move their German headquarters out of Munich, which would cost the city lots of tax revenue.

https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

Most of the Windows malware gets deployed by some user downloading and executing random files they downloaded on the web. Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector. Running random scripts from the internet by downloading them using curl and piping them into sudo bash is a whole nother issue though. Noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu should IMO have some safeguards in place to block these actions.

Except they couldn’t keep the Micro$oft criminals lobbyists out

@daniel31x13@lemmy.world

No, but I think ArchiveBox would be a much better place to implement this

They probably pay lots of money for it

Peppermint - not Ubuntu, but Debian, so it’s pretty similar

Without all the features that actually made the Steam Controller great… yeah

Buying a Pixel is a good idea, especially if you put GrapheneOS on it. It’s by far the best mobile operating system I’ve ever used.

Mastodon would require a separate login.

Ok I just assumed that most people on Lemmy would also have a Mastodon account, apparently that’s not really the case?

I’m desperately waiting for Lemmy to add support for federated polls

But GrapheneOS works on them.

And GrapheneOS has call recording btw

Again, many apps are broken.

Which apps do you mean? Most apps work just fine on GOS, even many banking apps and others that require proprietary Google Play services. The only apps that don’t work, are those that make use of Google’s completely stupid “Play Protect” API, which claims to verify that a device is secure, but in reality has absolutely nothing to do with security. Google (and other Big Tech companies) don’t give a single fuck about your security. It’s not Graphene’s fault, and has to do with nothing more than Google’s monopolistic practices. It’s designed in a way, where an operating system has to be manually whitelisted by Google, in order to get certified. Obviously, they only allowlisted their own spyware-filled proprietary OS, which is less secure than Graphene.

Fairphone might be interesting

Unfortunately Fairphones are highly insecure, shipping with a completely broken implementation of Android Verified Boot, and using the publically available AOSP test private signing keys by default to sign the OS. They also lack all the hardware security features present in modern Pixel devices.

When do you think will Valve enable this by default in SteamOS? It would greatly help the little Steam Deck with playing more performance-intensive titles.

Do you use the Stock OS, or a custom ROM?

Yes, GrapheneOS is always very quick to push out new updates.

not to mention Chinese OEMs which can recharge more than twice as fast

Which absolutely fries your battery. That’s one of the reasons Chinese phones would typically have horrible battery life, were it not for their stupid and aggressive “battery savers” and process killers that prevent basically anything from running in the background, which makes some tasks completely unfeasible/impossible on these devices. You want to receive push notifications outside of Google Play/FCM? Too bad, your app is gonna get killed after like 2 minutes of background usage. You want to sync your files/photos/contacts/calender/anything with your self-hosted server? Too bad, you can’t do that, because some Chinese manufacturer wants to market their phone with some crazy 120W charging and doesn’t give a fuck about the consequences. There’s a reason why Apple has stuck to 5W charging for so many years. And it’s not because they couldn’t figure out how to make it faster…

To be fair, there’s always been backspace feature, it’s just a swipe gesture, not a dedicated button

That’s been Microsoft’s slogan for decades

Only for some apps